Category: LookingOutwards-08

atraylor – Looking Outwards 08 – Section B

For this post, I watched Chris Sugrue‘s lecture. She is a visual artist, designer and programmer who creates digital interactive installations. She has a Masters of Fine Arts in Design from Parsons School of Design and currently teaches at Parsons Paris, in France. Sugrue’s art is self described as playful, and mainly comprises of light and interaction.

Someone using Delicate Boundaries.

I’m inspired by her work because it focuses on immersing the viewer/user in the interaction and in the world that she has created. Her project Delicate Boundaries is interesting to me because it bridges the gap between the screen and the real world through an illusion where bugs emerge from the screen and onto your arms when it’s touched. I like the life that she gave to the virtual bugs as they swarm your hand desperate to escape. Her other projects, like Memory of Form and Matter and Base 8, also use illusions like Pepper’s ghost to integrate digital imagery in to the physical world.

A still from Memory of Form and Matter

 

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CLOUDS

Browsing the list of speakers, the thumbnail for CLOUDS caught my attention. It’s an interactive documentary representing open source communities through depicting the stories of invention and discovery of 45 programmers. The team behind CLOUDS consists of James George, an artist who uses computational photography for making portraits and interactive storytelling, and Jonathan Minard, an alum of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute who uses an anthropological approach to tell stories of the shifts of science and art.

The use of computational graphics to tell these stories lends an even more cohesive approach to telling these stories. It adds another dimension to the idea of marrying videography, design, and programming.

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(Above is Kate Hollenbach’s lecture at INST-INT 2014)

Kate Hollenbach is an artist and programmer who develops interactive systems and technologies that incorporate the human body, human gestures as well as the environment’s physical space. Her experiences came from being an interface designer and product developer from a computer science undergraduate background. She was previously the Director of Design and Computation at Oblong Industries, where she oversaw the Mezzanine project. One of the projects she took part of while at Oblong that I thought was the most interesting was “Tamper”. It uses multiple screens that play videos and the Tamper system allows the user to edit videos (cinematic design) through gestures alone, which is sensed through wearing a glove. What I love about this project is that this type of technology always seemed so surreal and only seen in movies. However, it is possible through sensors and data collection. It is making the imagined possible. And then from the Tamper project, it led to other projects that are more developed, such as the G-Speak (eg. allows more than one human interaction with the system) or the Rummage (eg. photo sorting). All of her projects think about the 3D space, transforming two-dimensional things like videos and photos into an object within a XYZ plane. As her works are very complex and may not be easily understood or visualized through words alone, they are explained through demonstration videos of someone interacting with the system.

 

(Below is a demonstration of what Tamper does)

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The person I chose to reflect on for this week’s Looking Outwards is J.Meejin Yoon

Caption: A picture of J.Meejin and her husband, Eric. Together, they founded an architectural studio, called Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP, as a husband and wife team. Yoon is also a cofounder of MyStudio.

J.Meejin Yoon is an architect, designer, and educator. She started her education in 1995, at Cornell University studying architecture. Then, she received her Masters of Architecture in Urban Design at Harvard (1997).

Now, she is the head of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Along with the 2015 new Generation Award, she was has been recognized as Architecture League’s Emerging Voices (2012), Rome Prize in Design (2005) and many more. Her works and research focus on intersecting architecture, technology, nature, and public space.

Caption: Eyeo talk by J.Meejin Yoon on interactive play in public space. I admired her presentation because she presented her work with humor, honesty, and thought processes to specific aspects of the project.

I admire that her work consistently incorporated nature. In addition, I like how her work aims to encourage  human interaction. I admire her as a person. She is very humble, yet so accomplished.

My favorite project was “Swing Time.” I liked this project because it was all about encouraging people of all ages to play and engage. She specifically mentioned, that she wanted to experiment to find a way to allow parents and young adults to be brought back to their childhood days with this project. I also really liked her project, Sean Collier Memorial. I like the way she incorporated Incan architecture and how she said at the end: the project was no longer her’s, but the project was now the MIT community’s.

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INSTINT 2014-Jen Lewin

I decided to look into the works of Jen Lewin based on the information she delivered during her Eyeo Festival talk in 2014. Based in New York, Lewin works as a light and interactive sculptor, making works that allow the public to create their own art. What I found inspirational was Lewin’s focus on the “experience” of her art. Traditionally, art is almost always defined by its final product. However, with Lewin’s publicly available art, that is not the case. Lewin’s ability to allow her art to be ever-changing as a deviation to the norm makes it even more admirable.

The way that Lewin presented her work made me appreciate her work even more. Rather than just displaying each of the projects she accomplished or listing out the things that she had done, she went into her process and reasoning behind her decisions. The way in which she was able to express her thinking to her audience was incredibly effective in a way that positively promoted her work.

Magical Harp Sculpture

After watching the video, I delved in to her Magical Harp sculpture, located in Palo Alto, California in 2015. Deemed, playful, yet sophisticated, the piece was included in the Magical Bridge Playground, an unconventional sort of playground allowing those of different cognitive and physical abilities to enjoy. The consideration of those with different capabilities as well as the overall construction and design of the piece was incredibly inspiring to watch.

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Complex Movements: Beware of Dandelions, 2016

L05, also known as Carlos Garcia, is a member of the Detroit based collective, Complex Movements, a group that aims to address social justice issues through multimedia performance art. Their current project “Beware of Dandelions” is a mobile art installation made up of a 400 square foot dome like structure. Viewers go inside the dome as the piece, which combines performance, hip hop, and generative design. This piece seeks to communicate about community organization, function as an oral history archive and as performance art. I was interested in Complex Movement’s work because of the approach Beware of Dandelions took to local social justice, turning it into an artistic attraction that allows visitors and locals to engage in the issue in a captivating manner.

Link to Complex Movement’s website

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While we center art on a lot of traditional style painting, drawings, and some new technology generated visual arts, Sissel Tolaas work is very interesting. In fact, it stinks. Sissel Tolas focus on scent and its ability to bring back memories. Tolaas has collected over 7000 different real scents. She believes that scent is one of the strongest image and memory provoking sense that we have. In her presentation, she showcases the variety of the scents she has collected and how they collect the scents in the first place. While Sissel Tolaas does not have a seperate artist page, she does have the smell memory kit infosite.

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Meejin Yoon received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 1995, a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from Harvard University in 1997, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Korea in 1998. Today, she is a Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT, as well as the co-founded of Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP and MY Studio. Throughout her career, Yoon has received numerous awards and accolades and her work has been widely recognized for its innovative and interdisciplinary nature. Examples of her past projects can be found at http://mystudio.us/.

Yoon’s body of work is focused on the intersection architecture, technology, and public space. I’m impressed by the strategic way she approaches her work; she pays a lot of attention to the practicality of materials, space, and interactive potential. I also admire the publicness of her work. While it’s difficult to create work to be displayed in a gallery, I think it can be even more difficult to create work that is meant to exist in a public space and tangibly benefit the people who pass through that space. One of her works that I feel encapsulates these aspects is the “public parasol” she created in downtown Phoenix, seen below. It’s official title is shadow play, and it was specifically created to provide shade during the hottest times of the day and let sunlight in during the cooler hours. Yoon also managed to save several tons of material by being strategic with the design.

“Shadow Play”, created in 2015 at Roosevelt Street in Phoenix. Photo Credit: http://www.howeleryoon.com/projects/shadow-play 

When watching Yoon’s talk, I noticed her use of visuals right away. She includes so many relevant visuals that it was very rare for the video to be focused on her face. She is also very effective at providing background information that enhances the audience’s understanding of her work. For example, I would have been a little confused with the Mobius strip dress had I not known the cultural differences between how clothing is created. I think I’ll take these ideas to heart when I present my own work in the future. If needed, I’ll try to include any sketches I did and talk about my inspiration(s).

hyt-Looking-Outward-08: Morehshin Allahyari

Artworks

Eyeo 2017 talk: https://vimeo.com/search?q=eyeo+morehshin

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, thinker and activist originally born in Iran and later immigrated to the US. I was particularly drawn to her work  because of her selected focuses on social and political activism using experimental artforms — animation, 3d printing, web art, etc. Two of the projects that interested me in the lecture was the manifesto of Additivism and Material Speculation on ISIS. Specifically, for the latter one, she created 3D printed objects of old artifacts with a memory drive inside the artifact, supposedly preserving it for future generations for reference. I like the combination that the artist works between physicality and digital preservedness.

More work of hers can be viewed here: http://www.morehshin.com/material-speculation-isis/

(Sorry it seems like the Vimeo links were very hard to embed into this post, so I pasted the address link below.)

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Eyeo 2017 – Joanie Lemercier

Website

Joanie Lemercier is a French artist who works on projections of lights in space, exploring with how light and projections manipulated perceived reality. He sees light as medium and space as depth. He works on music festivals, installation, stage design, architecture, and, most recently, nature and landscape.

I am interested in exploring how he creates surreal 2D to 3D experiences using just lights and projections. He create these experiences by imitating the nature, translating instinct feelings, and creating visual manipulation. I am aspire how he goes with his concept to the last, using different mediums to complete high fidelity work. The created experiences are so immersive and powerful. In the Eyeo 2017 talk, it is interesting that he talks about that how human senses can be so easily deceived, that human need to be aware and critical about how they perceive reality.

Eyjafjallajökull, new york 2015

Château des Ducs de Bretagne, Nantes, 2010